Notes

2. Watch how the refrain changes throughout the song as Joe tries to bring it closer to his own idiom. In its original form, it goes: ‘Back and forth, Maureen, your bags and your belts, woman of the white stockings, I would like to be in bed (or in competition?) with you’.

3. An bandia úd bhí ag Iúpatar (that goddess of Jupiter’s).

4. A chaith tréimhse seal in Ifreann (who gave a while in Hell). Presumably Euridice?

8. Ardphort (high tune). Joe’s version – which might mean ‘airy tune’ – would make more sense, if it weren’t for the normal translation of aerphort as ‘airport’!

It’s clear from Joe’s performance – and not just from the sound of pages turning – that Joe was reading this song from a printed source. The text is flowery, replete with classical references – probably composed by a country schoolmaster somewhere in Munster. In any case, it’s not the sort of Irish that Joe would have found idiomatic, particularly if he’s reading it for the first time, so it’s hardly surprising that some of the lines come out as gibberish. The footnotes give the text as it probably appeared on the page in front of him, and the translations apply to that text. While we can’t be sure what source he was looking it, a close approximation is to be found in Seán Óg and Mánus Ó Baoill, Ceolta Gael (Dublin 1975), 72.

Unlike the usual air associated with this text (given in Ó Baoill, above), Joe uses the one associated with the Conamara song Máire Mhór, about a memorable local female. Some of the lines from the chorus of that song appear to have been transferred to One Day for Recreation:

You should see Big Mary walking the streets of Galway town, Her backside to the wind and her belly to the sea! Oho, Big Mary, Big Mary will you come? If you don’t come as you promised, may you be drowned in the tide!

‘If I were back at Marcus Dick’s all dressed up, Wouldn’t every man in the place be saying, ‘Too bad you’re not in bed with me!’ Oho, Big Mary…